Michael Schmidt
Michael Schmidt was born in Berlin in 1945, in the final months of the Second World War, into a city that was being reduced to rubble by Allied bombing. He grew up in West Berlin, in the shadow of the Wall that divided the city from 1961 onwards, and it is impossible to understand his […]
Read MoreMary Ellen Mark
Mary Ellen Mark was born on March 20, 1940, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, into a middle-class family with deep roots in the city. From an early age she showed an instinct for visual storytelling, drawn to painting and drawing before discovering the camera as a teenager. She studied painting and art history at the University of […]
Read MoreMartine Franck
Martine Franck was born in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1938, into a cultured and cosmopolitan family. She grew up partly in Belgium and partly in England, where she attended school, before studying art history at the University of Madrid and the École du Louvre in Paris. Her early studies immersed her in the visual traditions of […]
Read MoreMarkéta Luskačová
Markéta Luskačová was born in Prague in 1944, during the final year of the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. She grew up in the post-war period, studied sociology and philosophy at Charles University in Prague, and it was through her sociological research that she first encountered the communities that would become the subject of her most […]
Read MoreMark Neville
Mark Neville was born in London in 1966 and studied at the Royal College of Art and Goldsmiths, University of London, where he developed the socially engaged photographic practice that would distinguish his career. Unlike photographers who observe communities from the outside and exhibit the resulting images in galleries far removed from the lives they […]
Read MoreMark Cohen
Mark Cohen was born in 1943 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a small industrial city in the coal-mining region of the northeastern part of the state. He has lived and worked there for virtually his entire life, a fact that distinguishes him from nearly every other photographer of comparable stature. While his contemporaries roamed the world in […]
Read MoreMargaret Bourke-White
Margaret Bourke-White was born in the Bronx on 14 June 1904, the daughter of an engineer-inventor father and a progressive, intellectually ambitious mother who encouraged her daughter’s curiosity about the natural and mechanical world. Her father, Joseph White, worked in the printing industry and took young Margaret to factories and foundries, instilling in her a […]
Read MoreMarcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was born on 28 July 1887 in Blainville-Crevon, a small town in Normandy, into a family of remarkable artistic accomplishment. His elder brothers, Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, were both established artists; his sister Suzanne Duchamp would become a painter of note. The young Marcel studied at the Académie Julian in Paris from […]
Read MoreMan Ray
Man Ray was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia in 1890, the eldest child of Russian-Jewish immigrants who had recently arrived in the United States. The family moved to Brooklyn when he was seven, and it was in New York that the young Emmanuel — who would adopt the name Man Ray around 1912 — first […]
Read MoreLua Ribeira
Lua Ribeira was born in Barcelona in 1986 and grew up in a city whose own traditions of street festival and communal spectacle would later find deep resonance in her photographic work. She studied fine art at the University of Barcelona before moving to the United Kingdom, where she completed a master’s degree in documentary […]
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